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Tiny Chiplets: a New Level of Micro Manufacturing
concealment sends this quote from the NY Times:
"Today’s chips are made on large wafers that hold hundreds of fingernail-sized dies, each with the same electronic circuit. The wafers are cut into individual dies and packaged separately, only to be reassembled on printed circuit boards, which may each hold dozens or hundreds of chips. PARC researchers have a very different model in mind. ... they have designed a laser-printer-like machine that will precisely place tens or even hundreds of thousands of chiplets, each no larger than a grain of sand, on a surface in exactly the right location and in the right orientation. The chiplets can be both microprocessors and computer memory as well as the other circuits needed to create complete computers. They can also be analog devices known as microelectromechanical systems, or MEMS, that perform tasks like sensing heat, pressure or motion. The new manufacturing system the PARC researchers envision could be used to build custom computers one at a time, or as part of a 3-D printing system that makes smart objects with computing woven right into them."
TFA goes on to say it goes against 50 years of thinking. Spreading out transistors rather than putting them closer together.
They're still placing traditionally produced silicon wafers on what is effectively a printed circuit board. The wafers are just smaller. The method of placing them is new.
I don't see how spreading out parts of a system that operate in the many GHz range is going to help performance. You'll run into problems of electrons not passing charge quick enough because of that pesky speed of light thing. At 3GHz, light only travels 100mm per cycle. Electricity won't go further than 95mm in copper. Half that if you look at the speeds in parts of the core of old P4 processors, upwards of 7GHz.
I like cool ranch flavoring myself.
re: unless they can also come up with an inkjet like process to change process chemistry on minute parts of the wafer, they will run into the same cost issues as all other process-in-memory researchers. /. like of me to RTFA, but I did!)...
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I believe that the different substrates used in the printer are manufactured separately. E.G. printer well #1 contains thousands or millions of copies of chiplet-type #1, well #2 contains only 10^3s to 10^6s copies of chiplet-type #2, etc. So these "ink supplies" can all be manufactured separately, so a memory chiplet could be made on a wafer with process physics fine-tuned for RAM production, whereas a logic or multiplexing or signal-crossover chiplet could be made on a wafer using process physics tuned for logic LSI / VLSI production. Thus the individual ink types are manufactured in an optimal manner for the type of chiplet.
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It's when the chiplets are "sprayed" or distributed onto the final substrate that the lasers are used to reposition and realign and reorient the chiplets in order to combine them into a composite computational structure. Or that's my reading of TFA (un
It has the same components as a traditional Xerox machine. There is a drum that rotates and their positioning technology put the chiplets in precise locations on the substrate. The chiplets are in a fluid that acts like toner.
It appears that the performance depends on how fast the substrate conducts signals. At this point it seems unlikely that this is as fast as an on chip connection, but there seems to be no intrinsic reason that it would be any slower then the wires that hook a chip pad to a package pin. In aggregate the speed might be faster then a circuit board because the chiplits could be closer together then chips on a board.
One possible deployment would be to use this to assemble components which are then packaged in a standard IC. It's like an SOIC, except the parts are not all on one piece of silicon.
There are potential economies of scale. With an inventory of chiplets, and automation to make the interconnect substrate with CAD, a custom assembly line can create vast numbers of different configurations and not have to include a foundry in the loop.
Despite all the naysayers that have already posted, this is a potentially game changing technology.
Why is Snark Required?
A Laser printer doesn't use the same technology to make "normal" chips. A laser is used to create a static charge on a drum that picks up toner and rolls it on to the paper. From their likening it to a laser printer, I'm assuming they're picking up "chiplets" instead of toner with a drum.
Nothing like the process of burning away or curing a resist material then chemically removing exposed areas that is used to make "normal" chips.
Because they're not talking about rolling a dice. The plural for "die", as in a stamp or a mold is "dies"
Well no. It's just multi-module packaging using a slightly odd chip placement technique. Getting a chip into a package that can safely be handled by a pick and place robot is a significant part of the expense in constructing chips. Packageless pick and place would seem like a valuable idea, and presumably fluids and magnetic fields can be more delicate than any mechanical robot. Pick and place all your chips "naked", then slap a lid on the result, and you can cram an entire motherboard worth of components into much less space than usual. It's a PC in a chip, without losing modularity and wafer yields.
That guy trying to build an entire PC into the PCMCIA form factor has the same idea, though he still has to use discrete chips and a board inside his package, so it's thicker than it otherwise might be, and considerably far away from the state of the art in performance. This is the natural evolution of that idea, so to speak, and presumably it could meet or exceed the state of the art in performance. Heat dissipation strikes me as being a serious problem though.
I thought maybe they created a new technique use ants and pheremones to deliver micro-chiplets to the appropriate site. Perhaps the beginning of a new algorithm for constructing items with the chiplets using biological delivery mechanisms. If it's a military project, they might use "soldier ants"! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_robotics
Yes, such things as salt, paprika flavor (or cheese and union). It makes for far more tasty chips.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
From their likening it to a laser printer, I'm assuming they're picking up "chiplets" instead of toner with a drum.
You're only assuming and guessing though... but that's not really your fault, because the article didn't explain any of this. Am I the only person that found it disappointing in terms of describing how *exactly* the process was supposed to work, rather than making generalised comparisons with a laser printer? A laser printer simply has to deposit a certain amount of a homogenous material in a given position, whereas this would have to deposit a specific component type (of a mixture) at a given location, and this major difference isn't addressed.
The closest it came to this was describing "microscopic electrical fields [that] control the precise placement of tiny electronic circuits — not just in the correct position, but with the proper orientation as well", but without saying how this was meant to work.
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